


Lovely, Dark, and Deep

by willowoftheriver



Category: Far Cry 5, Slender Man Mythos
Genre: F/M, Horror, I Don't Even Know, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Child Abuse, Random & Short, Religious Fanaticism, Slender Sickness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 21:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: There's more in Hope County than just a cult.





	Lovely, Dark, and Deep

There is a snake in his garden.

Joseph knows this. Joseph accepts this.

Perhaps he’s even being _unfair_ to her, in a way. God has a plan for all of them, plotted out somewhere far separate from their comprehension, weaved in a predetermined design since the inception of time. And they all have their part in it. The Voice told him his. This is hers—and it’s so . . . so _appropriate_ , isn’t it, how beautiful a vision of hell she is. Pale and serpentine; pride, _hubris_ , in every slender line of her body as she reached out to put the cuffs on him, unable to let herself back down, to slink back into the shadows behind the White Horse and leave the garden.

Now the world is burning, and everything that he’s devoted himself to creating is falling down around him, and his children are dying— _slaughtered_ , like lambs, souls that he’s worked so hard to save, that he was _bidden_ to save—but he cannot claw at her in wrath and lust and _greed_ —

No, no. She is temptation, and she is hellfire, and she is _madness_ , and though he feels that one day, one day when she finally _sees_ what she will have wrought, there will be something more to her, to them—it’s not today. She has a purpose to fulfill, more sins to commit, more pride to wallow in. Only then, at the height of her filth, can she be truly cleansed. A baptism amongst fire and ash.

He wishes, though—right now, in this instant—that she were here, next to him. Just so he isn’t alone.

( _Is_ he alone?)

There’s blood in his mouth, inching down the back of his tongue, past his tonsils. He can feel it on his upper lip, run down from his nose. (He’s not prone to nosebleeds. He can’t even remember the last time he had one. Maybe as a child, when his father was _hitting, hitting, hitting_ and the world was distant and blurry and the Voice, the _Voice_ —)

The Voice is silent now. He could weep for It, get down on his knees and grind his forehead into the dirt and _beg_ for It, for just a word, _anything_. To know that he’s not alone. Not somewhere It can’t _reach_ him.

(Guidance. Please God, give him guidance.)

He’s wearing a shirt, and a vest. Montana nights, especially at this elevation, are chilly no matter the season—no Georgia heat here, no sitting on a rickety front porch in the castoff light of a streetlamp listening to cicadas as sweat poured down your back and mosquitoes ate you alive.

He’s not sure he can even imagine he’s ever been that hot. It seems to be coming from inside him, this—this unbearable _cold_ , this leeching of warmth that leaves even the blood on his face devoid of heat.

All of the fine hair on his body is standing up. He doesn’t think he ever knew what that was really like, the full meaning of the phrase, until now.

(Maybe he’s in shock. But no, no—he knows that. Knows the lightheaded unreality of it, the feeling of the blood in his body not being where it’s supposed to be, all of it sitting heavy down in his limbs and his stomach and gushing warm out of jagged wounds he can’t feel. Crawling out of twisted metal over shattered glass without the conscious realization of movement. A kind, numb blanket removing him from the immediacy of the situation, from the sight of his wife’s corpse.)

This . . . this is so very clear. So very present. He feels like he might vomit, but he’s not going to pass out. He’s so painfully, _painfully_ awake.

To be honest, the—the _head_ isn’t even the detail that his mind has caught on. Not the length of the limbs. Not even that, that _unmistakable_ feeling of being watched—that prickle across his skin, the sense of exposure that forms the basis for so many of his earliest memories, narrow bloodshot eyes watching him over the rim of a whiskey glass.

What he just. can’t. quite. process is the suit.

Because a suit is a _human_ thing, a human thing the Bigfoot and Skinwalkers of local legend don’t wear, as it would require _thought_ and _intelligence_ and _willful imitation_ , a half-formed mimicry by something that watches and learns but just. _can’t_. do it right, because it’s so fundamentally _wrong_.

“—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths—” His lips are still moving, repeating the same prayer again and again. He’s lost count of how many times. (The blood is sticky on the back of his teeth, his tongue catching on the roof of his mouth.)

(The Father is serene and gentle and eloquent, so eloquent, because words are all he’s ever really had. Not the pathetic, humiliated, frightened child that Joseph Seed used to be.

But not today. Not today.)

He wants to close his eyes. Push further back into the wall with his knees up to his chest like he did when he was a child and hope it’ll all just go away. But there’s no Jacob here right now to stand in front of him and deal with what he can’t, and if his eyes are shut, how will he know if it moves?

(So Joseph doesn’t blink. He stares until his eyes are raw.)

There is a snake in his garden.

Joseph knows this. Joseph accepts this.

He just hadn’t realized there’s a demon, too.

(All the children are gone now.)

**Author's Note:**

> So, you know what I decided Far Cry 5 needed? That's right! An outdated creepy pasta!! But, Slender Man was, and still kind of is, something that utterly terrifies me as a concept. And hey, he comes from the woods, and there are tons of woods in Hope County, so my logic is, er, totally flawless.
> 
> I have to warn you that as really great and defining as Marble Hornets is, I kind of like my Slender Man a little different. Just as a completely inscrutable, near omnipotent malevolence of undefined origin who stalks you relentlessly for unknown reasons, with no proxies involved. I love the concept of Slender Sickness, though.
> 
> -Anna


End file.
